The flowering of Indian writing in English is in no small measure the fruit of its diaspora. Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Bapsi Sidhwa, Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri - it seems as if the finest crop of writers are on the other side of the Atlantic.

Have they positioned themselves as interpreters and chroniclers to the West of this diverse and complex nation?

Certainly, they have created a richer India in the international literary firmament than that which lies beyond the catastrophe headlines. But do these writers ever wonder who their real audience is?

Going by the media hype their book launches receive in India, there's no doubting their desire "to matter to India," as Shashi Tharoor, 45, candidly admits. Well, he must have been gratified to see how much he mattered to India by the huge literati turnout for the launch of his new novel, Riot, by Penguin Books in Delhi on Monday.

The author of five books including The Great Indian Novel - arguably his best book to date - Tharoor lives and writes in New York where he wears a second hat as a senior UN official. Apart from being special assistant to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, he is also heading the Department of Public Information.

You would think that leaves him little time to write, but the dedicated novelist has used almost every free evening and weekend for the last 15 years to write satirical novels, books and articles on India.

Talking about his latest book, Riot, Tharoor traced its genesis to the Sikh riots followed by the 1989 Hindu-Muslim riots. As someone who has watched and studied the rise of religious fundamentalism in India - albeit from a distance - he has used the novel to explore the social, political and religious dynamics a work in Indian society.

Describing the book he said: "It's about love, hate, cultural collision, religious fanaticism and the ownership of history. It's about the impossibility of knowing the truth." Nevertheless, that has never deterred him from searching for it.

Excerpts from an interview:

Q: Is Riot very different from your other books? Of all the books you have written so far, which one did you struggle with the most?

A: This one, because it endured the most interruptions from my professional and personal life. With fiction, you need not only time - which I am always struggling to find - but you also need a space inside your head, to create an alternative universe and to inhabit it so intimately that its reality infuses your awareness of the world.

That is all the more difficult when your daily obligations and responsibilities are so onerous that they are constantly pressing in on you, and you don't have a clear stretch of time to immerse yourself in your fictional universe. And yes, Riot is a departure for me fictionally, because unlike my earlier novels it is not a satirical work.

Like the other two, though, it takes liberties with the fictional form. I have always believed that the very word "novel" implies that there must be something "new" about each one. What was new to me about the way Riot unfolded was that I told the story through newspaper clippings, diary entries, interviews, transcripts, journals, scrapbooks, even poems written by the characters - in other words, using different voices, different stylistic forms, for different fragments of the story.

It is also a book you can read in any order: though ideally you should read it from beginning to end, you can pick it up from any chapter, go back or forward to any other chapter, and you will bring a different level of awareness to the story.

Q: What sort of reaction do you usually see from the readers to your books? Is there a difference in reactions from an Indian reader and an American reader?

A: I get all sorts of reactions, and many - both letters and personal encounters - have been deeply gratifying. My fiction sometimes appeals in different ways to Americans and to Indians, but the whole point about literature, surely, is that while it rests on specificities of time and place, it must appeal to readers beyond those specifics.

The Great Indian Novel, as a reinvention of the Mahabharata, inevitably reaches Indians in a way that most foreigners will not fully appreciate, but some of the most erudite appreciations of the book have in fact come from Indophiles abroad.

Show Business did extremely well with American reviewers and readers, who enjoyed the way I tried to portray the lives and stories of Bollywood as a metaphor for Indian society, but some Indian readers and critics could not look beyond the cinematic parody.

With Riot, for the first time, I have major non-Indian characters, and that is bound to affect the way the book is perceived both in America and in India.

Q: Are you working on another book already?

A: Alas, no! Finishing a book in these circumstances is such an arduous business that once it is done one just wallows in relief. In any case, there are still things to be done when a novel is published - proofs to be corrected, interviews to be given....

Q: What do you like about writing? What do you NOT like about writing?

A: I write, as George Bernard Shaw said, for the same reason a cow gives milk: it's inside me, it's got to come out, and in a real sense I would die if I couldn't. It's the way I express my reaction to the world I live in. Sometimes the words come more easily than at other times, but writing is my lifeblood. Liking and not liking doesn't enter into it.

Q: What do you foresee as the future of India, say for the next 10 years?

A: I have been described as an optimist, and basically I am, but I have also been unsparing in my assessments of what we have done (and are doing) wrong. We have made enormous strides, but we still have to do more to open up the economy, end corruption, attack the criminalisation of politics, and provide a decent life (and real hope) to half our population who remain mired in poverty.

But I tend to define optimism as looking at the future with uncertainty. The pessimist says "everything will go wrong"; the optimist says, "enough things may go right." I believe that, in my various writings, while I have pointed to what's wrong, I have found enough reasons to suggest that things may go right.